Abstract

The following article traces Bataille’s lifelong effort to make laughter more than an experience or an object of reflection, namely a new form of thinking which would be at the same time a thinking from the other and the «wholly other». Ever since he read Bergson’s essay Le Rire in London in 1920 the subject has gripped him. It runs through his drafts of an atheology and is closely associated with non-knowledge. Laughter is the oldest of the paradigms by which he analyzes sovereignty or heterogeneity and it retains this value into his final years in which repeatedly he refers to his thought as a philosophy of laughter